


Mark'd to Die

by Shiggityshwa



Series: Watch the Birdie [13]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Character Death, Episode: s10e13 The Road Not Taken, F/M, Ori, Pre-the road not taken, dark au, orici
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27921772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shiggityshwa/pseuds/Shiggityshwa
Summary: An imagined retelling of Season 9 and 10 in the 'Road Not Taken' universe. Thirteenth in an ongoing series detailing what happened in the The Road Not Taken universe before Sam's arrival. Focuses Cameron's fall from grace and Vala's incarceration at Area 51. This story deals specifically with the consequences of returning to Earth.
Relationships: Vala Mal Doran/Cameron Mitchell
Series: Watch the Birdie [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1183454
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. A Wicked Lie

It takes two more weeks for him to make it out of the hospital and back under the mountain. That’s with him not agreeing to anything the nurses and doctors asked of him. The psychiatrist they hired who asked him what exactly happened when he was in another galaxy, who he doesn’t tell a damn thing to. He kept asking for her, and when he realized they would never let her out of the mountain, he started asking to go back.

They give him a warning.

General Hammond visits him as he settles back into his dorm, Jackson helping him bring in a handful of get-well flowers that decorated his private hospital room.

“I’m not going to beat around the bush, Son.” Hammond stands solid in the middle of his room, watching as he putters around, just mobile enough to use the cane—the same cane from a year ago. “I know you want to see her, but you need to wait until the all clear is given.”

He plops down on to the side of the bed, stretching out his leg that’s still a little creaky. “Which will be when, exactly?”

“The president is just going over some of the minor details. Shouldn’t be longer than another week.” With that, Hammond excuses himself, not noticing or caring when he doesn’t stand at attention as he does.

Jackson sets the last wilting flower on top of his dresser, and turns to leave, pausing at the door to glance back over his shoulder with an ominous warning.

“Don’t do anything stupid, Mitchell.”


	2. Silence in the Tortured Soul

What he does isn’t stupid, it’s natural.

He spends the two days gathering intel; finds out that she’s in the basement brig again, kept in the same cell she was last time. It’s not all that helpful though because the etchings on the doors—the numbers and letters—still aren’t from any alphabet he knows.

Then he circles in on the weak links. Despite how strong the military would like to think it is, every operation has officers that have bad habits—or bad records—and he secures information using the almost all access pass he was given back when he was just the perfect poster boy for the United States Air Force and the Stargate Program.

The PR people said he had a grin and a demeanor that people trusted—they weren’t wrong because with a bit of sweet talking, and just a bit of blackmailing, he’s able to not only find the door he’s looking for but has an all-access pass to it upgraded on his ID card.

The door hisses and he doesn’t know what to expect because last time she was brought to him, chained across from him at that interrogation table—forced to interact with him because it was what he wanted. He didn’t get to see where they were keeping her, didn’t get to see the environment, but he knows he didn’t expect this.

It’s small, closet small with a toilet, a sink and a bed all crammed in like old Christmas decorations or family movies in the crawlspace of an attic. The temperature has to be below freezing, doesn’t know if this was done on purpose, if it’s a bad electrical connection, or if it just has something to do with being this far underground.

The lights on in the room at 0200 are ridiculous, almost blinding because everything is white. White tiled walls, white tiled floors, the bed is almost as white as her skin. There are no sheets or blankets, and her dark hair and orange jumpsuit, make her stand out like a sore thumb.

Her back is to him, and she’s huddle on her side, shivering, trying to keep warm.

The doors hiss closed behind him, and he grins, because he can smell her from here, over what he assumes is a chemical used to sterilize the room that smells like rubbing alcohol and hand sanitizer. He can smell the faint scent of earth against her skin, the kind he tangled in bed with for so long.

“Vala,” it’s a harsh whisper as he takes a step forward. She’s a light sleeper, but when she’s woken up suddenly she gets defensive, tends to lash out as he found out the hard way. With another step forward, and only one more to get to her, he calls to her again, “Vala?”

Her shoulders tense, and her breathing slows until he can’t see the ride and fall of her chest any longer, knows that she’s awake, that she’d playing dead, trying to figure out who he is. “Honey, it’s okay it’s just—”

But when he takes another step forward, he’s stands almost next to the bed, looking down on her, the goosebumps over her skin, her toes curl into her feet, the hair clumping around her face, a slight blush in her cheeks, and—

“Vala, wake up!”

The hesitancy disappears from his touch as he shoots a hand forward to her shoulder, shaking her once, then again until she flinches, yanking her arm away from him and scrambling back into the corner where the mattress meets the wall.

“Cameron?” Her eyes are bleary and only half-open. Her skin is blotchy. Her blinks are uncoordinated by sunken eyes that can’t focus on him. He’s seen her tired before, exhausted, dehydrated, and infected.

None of that is this.

It’s so concerning, that for a minute, he forgets the reason why he woke her up so violently, the fear and shock that blended within him to make him ignore her comfort and his own—now nearly resting his whole body into his cane. Make him abandon the notion of a storybook romantic reunion, where they laughed and held each other because that’s all they wanted.

Where they restated how all they needed was each other.

Forgot all of it because her stomach is flat.

“Vala, where’s the baby?”

He shifts his cane, leaning forward, crouching down as much as he can with the pain shooting through his lower back, hip, and thigh.

Just ignores it because it doesn’t matter anymore.

Tries to soften his voice, keep the jittering out of it, but his mind is racing through all the scenarios he can think of and somehow the best is still violently the worst.

Her one eye closes as she angles her head to the side trying to understand his words. Her hair isn’t as long as it was the last time he saw her, and barely tumbles off her shoulder with her tilt. The other eye blinks, slowly, staying closed for a long time. She has no expression. No emotion. She’s blank and she hums at him as an answer.

“Vala.” Digs his elbows into the stiff mattress, his hand reaching out and touching her ankle, icy and so white that it clashes against her stark orange pants. She doesn’t react to his touch at first, but then she giggles—not something he’s heard her do very often, and somehow it’s the most terrifying thing she could have done.

“Where’s the baby, Vala?”

She reaches down, her fingers tickling over each one of his wrapped around her, and her brows crease in thought, in translation, as she tries to work out what’s happening. The sway of her arm isn’t right, it moves lazily, like she has on weights or restraints, and when she turns her arm a specific way, there’s a disfiguring bruise on the opposite side of her elbow, red in the middle and purple to black radiating out.

They’ve been drugging her.

“Fuck.”

He needs answers, and the only one he trusts is doped out of her mind. 

Somewhere in her stupor, she knows that he came for her because she reaches out a hand, cold fingers fluttering at the bottom of his chin tilting his head up to view her.

He knows the strong woman he loves, he adores, has fought for, would die for, is in there somewhere. Knows that she went down kicking and screaming because they took something that didn’t belong to them.

They took someone he loves.

Maybe, two people he loves.

“Cameron?” Slants her head again, viewing him at an angle seems to help because she can’t keep her equilibrium, can’t sit up without slouching, without toppling over to one side or another. But she must recognize him, because she brings on of her fingers up to trace over the bridge of his nose where it broke against the console two years ago, down the tip and over his top lip.

He kisses the pad of her finger gently, trying to quell the fear, the unbridled rage surging through him that makes him feel like he could punch his way out of this cell. He tugs her towards him, to fall against his chest and she giggles again, sort of a snort, a hidden laugh about something he doesn’t understand because he has no idea what she’s been through.

What they’ve done to her.

“Vala.” He nudges her hair away from her ear so he can speak with her privately, like he could coax out the real her from underneath the blanket of drugs, from all the vines of trauma wrapping around and digging into her body.

“Yes?” Her head lolls against his shoulder before rolling to rest the side of her face against his. He strokes her back, feeling ribs and skin through the thin material on her shirt.

In a whisper, like it’s a secret between them, like they’re playing a game, he brushes his nose to her ear again, making sure his voice doesn’t stutter with all the unknowns, “where’s the baby?”

“Wha—?” Her eyes are droopy and unfocused again, but she still has that grin planted on her lips.

He reaches his hand to her stomach, flat and recoiling under the shirt fabric. “Our baby.”

“Our—" Her eyes narrow, her body shaking as she uses her hands pressing into the mattress to stay stable. He can see her try to navigate through the haze surrounding her mind and her hand drops to her stomach, flitting around, as if searching for evidence.

Her eyes scroll back up to meet his, pupils dilated, irises shifting around wildly, searching for him even though she’s staring directly at him.

He nods waiting for her to elaborate as tears well in her eyes because she’s uncovered the memory. “Where are they, Vala?”

“They took her—” The first tear catches on her lashes as she trembles in front of him, digging her hands onto his shoulders for balance.

“Her?” He laughs, sniffling, not realizing he’s already shed tears. “We have a daughter?”

In a voice full of malice, dripping with bitterness—a cringing tone he’s never heard from her before—she adds, “they killed her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title borrowed from Shakespeare's Richard II


	3. Coin My Heart

“You have to understand, Colonel Mitchell,” Dr. Lam stands on the opposite side of the debriefing table from where he’s sitting cuffed to his chair.

After Vala told him, in the barest, most chilling sentence he’s ever heard, he stayed with her the brig, holding her until she fell into a sleep against him, cradled her to his body, the way that he would never get to hold their daughter.

It didn’t take long for her body to collapse into him, her head laying on his shoulder, and her breathing evening out and he sat there and just held her until someone realized where he was and came to get him.

Then he let all hell loose.

It culminated in him fist fighting anyone who came within a foot of him in that bright, glaring hallway in the brig. First it was just a few privates that told him General Hammond wanted to speak with him, then more, then his fists were flying, hitting anyone he could because the rage in him was so high, so much, that it was solid, that it wasn’t moving or coursing, but weighing him down and he couldn’t get away from it.

He punched Jackson’s glasses clear off his face.

They had to taze him in order to get him to comply, to get him to drop his fists and fall to his knees on the ground.

They have both his arms cuffed to an office chair as they try to explain to him their part in what happened. General Hammond stands to the side near the door beside Jackson. The doctor’s glasses sit on the table—cracked lenses and all—and he holds an ice pack to his still bleeding broken nose.

“You killed her.” His voice is hoarse and empty, his eyes have cried until they can’t. It hurts to open them, to look at whatever genetic garbage they’ve put on display for him to observe. His knuckles are cracked and bleeding from everyone he’s hit.

“You told us the baby was the Orici,” Jackson’s voice is a nasally grunt, as he slaps down the icepack dyed in his own blood. “You know the Ori would never stop looking for her. It would give them a reason to continue their attack on us.”

“Seems like you handled them just fine after the jump through the Supergate.”

Hammond chimes in, his voice soft, carrying the pretense of understanding his pain, “Colonel, with what the Orici would have meant to the Ori forces, it was imperative that we get rid of any threat—”

Tries to stand, tries to burst from his chair, but the seat hits the back of his thighs making him sit back down again. Dr. Lam and Jackson flinch.

“Colonel Mitchell, I suggest you get your emotions under—”

“You killed her.”

Apparently his words are hanging heavy around Lam’s neck because she removes her hand from her face, and snaps at him, “Yes, and when we terminated the fetus, we thought she was the Orici.”

A deadly hush falls over the room. Not even Jackson’s sniffling, or the clack of his cuffs rubbing down the cushioned armrests of his chair makes a sound. He can’t even hear the sound of his own heart beating.

General Hammond shoots Lam daggers, his jaw square and set, and his eyes flashing dangerously.

Finally, in a low, threatening voice, he questions, “are you telling me that my little girl wasn’t the Orici?”

“It’s not that easy to—”

“You’re telling me that you killed my daughter, and she wasn’t even a threat?”

“Mitchell, it’s not as black and white as you think,” Jackson’s nasally voice is muffled by the ice pack again.

“You killed my baby, for no reason.”

“We needed to be sure and—”

“You killed her.”

There’s a brief pause with Hammond and Jackson both staring at Lam, willing to throw her under the bus instead of owning up to their part in his daughter’s death. A death he hasn’t even begun to process because he knows he’s in shock—he thought he’d be holding her in his arms and counting fingers and toes, not having to argue why killing her was wrong.

Lam exhales loudly, accepting her role, “Genetically, yes, her post-mortem blood samples came back as one hundred percent human.”

“You killed her,” his voice is softer this time, as the words start to ring in his ears like church bells and each time he understands them a little more. Understands what they took from him.

“Colonel, it’s not that simple—”

“She could have posed the greatest threat to humanity since—”

Hammond holds up his hand to halt the others, he walks rigidly to the table, standing straight and strong. “The president has been informed of the situation—” which is code for Landry okayed it “—he’s willing to work with you in order to rectify the situation to the best of—”

“He wants to pay me off for killing my unborn daughter?”

Understands what they did to her. What they did to Vala.

Hammond doesn’t react to his outburst, only adds, “his offer isn’t entirely monetary.”

“Oh yeah? What do I get instead? Real estate? Gold doubloons?”

“You’ll get full custody of Ms. Mal Doran.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title borrowed from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar


	4. Nurse of Shame

It doesn’t happen right away because they have to taper her off the meds. He’s taken to spending the entire day in a chair next to her bed, only leaving to do his physiotherapy two doors down. They try to make him leave more often, but he refuses until they’ll let her leave with him, even if it’s just back to his room. He doesn’t like the idea that she could be unconscious or not rational and someone like Lorne has access to her room.

In two days, she’s more lucid—shaking like crazy—but she recognizes him right away when he hobbles into her room from physio. Her hand reaches for the side of his face and when she touches his cheek she lets out a sob, until he grabs her, dropping his cane, wobbling, unstable with his own pain, but falling into the embrace.

He tells her he loves her every chance he gets, and she tries to shift over so he can have a spot next to her on the cot, but there’s not enough room—there’s never enough room—so he drags the chair over so it’s even with the bed, and they pretend he’s laying next to her.

What he doesn’t do is mention the baby in any manner.

Figures she’s got enough to focus on, getting her body clean, her mind right, before he starts digging at the grave she made in her mind for their daughter. 

He has so many questions—Did she get to hold her? Who did she look like? How did it happen?—but he knows better than to pry.

Has to attend a meeting with Hammond—one Landry is supposed to be present for too but is suspiciously absent from—about the legalities behind what they did, the contracts the SGC is going to have to draw up, how when he leaves here with her, he’s leaving carte blanche—honorably discharged.

Also gets a small house for them. The backyard he promised her, a little cottage for them to grow old in.

Just them.

Finally, they transfer her back to his suite and he finds her in the bathroom one day, just getting out of the shower—despite his earlier desires, he still hasn’t managed to make it in there with her, thinks it’s best to save it for when they’re really alone.

She dries off—never gaining a shyness around him—she rubs the towel across her body, down her thin, still pale, arms with a now fading bruises rippling from yellow to brown, over her breasts that are no longer full of milk to her stomach where a scar slashes from hip to hip. It grins as she bends to dry her legs—still new, still red—and he knows that they cut their daughter out of her, that nothing about the situation was natural.

He holds her at night, yearning to touch her, to love her, to show her how much he does, but knowing that her body is precarious in the lapse of what it was creating.

*

In the last week, her withdrawal symptoms are the worst.

Once Landry found out that he wasn’t going to be the good old military poster boy anymore, he basically sent them an eviction notice and as much as he’d love to honor it and get the hell out of this mountain, they can’t leave until her body isn’t dependent on the drugs anymore.

But with orders from her old man—the president—Lam speeds up the tapering process, like Vala’s body—her alien and beaten body—is supposed to get the memo.

She starts getting horrible, blinding headaches that hit her out of nowhere. Cause her to hold her head and stop walking, sometimes she groans and grinds her teeth, sometimes she screams and tries to hide her face in the bed pillows, her legs cycling underneath to try and outrun what’s inside of her.

He tries his best to help, but his medical knowledge is field-based, and he has no clue what to do.

He takes her Lam—who is more than weary of him, his threats, and his intent to act on them if they mistreat his wife any further—While she does agree to see Vala, she only checks her eyes, stating that because they’re dilating, she’s fine.

They leave with over-the-counter pain killers that she can’t even keep down because of how much she’s throwing up.

She wakes on the third night, her breathing elevated like she just ran a mile in a minute. He tries to calm her, holds her up and checks her pulse, he finds her heart beating so fast that when her whimpers quiet, he can see it jostle in her chest.

Lam doesn’t even bother to greet him this time, just deadpans that it’s a form of a panic attack, that it has nothing to do with withdrawal and if he could keep her calm, none of this would be happening.

That’s when he snaps, tired of their nonchalance, their lack of compassion, their throw away treatment of his wife. He threatens to call a real ambulance and when doctors find naquadah in her veins, he’s more than happy to discuss who she is, how she got here, what she did for the entire planet, and how the United States government has been repaying her over and over again by mutilating her body and holding her captive.

Lam bitches through the entire injection process, about how Landry’s not going to like it, how the president gave them an eviction notice for a reason, and how it doesn’t seem like he’s serious about leaving.

Without a very calm voice, and without glancing away from his wife whose vitals start to settle as soon as a small amount of the drug is in her system, he states, “I don’t give a shit.”

Finds himself camping out in the chair beside her for the night again. Falling asleep to the gentle rhythm of her vitals repeating on the machine to the right of him. Knows that he has to keep his cool because they’re almost free.

Thought they were free before, and each time he was wrong..

This time it seems like everything he wants is being presented to him wearing bows and all it took was the sacrifice of their daughter.

His child.

The only one he’s every going to have.

Vala wakes early in the morning, her hungover eyes examining the room quietly beside him as he tumbles out of an uneasy sleep. Catches her movement in the slow blink of his eyes, his chin dipping off the curve of his hand and immediately waking him up.

He clears his throat and is surprised when she’s not watching him like a hawk. Her fight or flight mechanism is off the hook lately. Whenever anything moves now, she scans and waits like a wild animal—preparing to attack or preparing to run.

He knows that the SGC did that to her.

Knows that the villagers in Ver Isca did that too her.

Knows that the way she’s been treated in the last two years has reverted her to animalistic defense mechanisms that she never employs against him.

Reaches for her hand, and she doesn’t flinch, allows him to collect cold and clammy fingers, wrapping them in his palm while watching her eyes dart around the room.

“I’m back in medical?”

“Yeah.”

Their voices rival each other in sleeplessness. In pure exhaustion.

“Why am I back in medical?”

Sometimes she has lapses in judgement—how much she can eat, how late it is, how far away something is, how cold the temperature is—and sometimes she has lapses in memory, forgetting what happened mere seconds ago, forgetting simple and important things like his name or hers—just for a few seconds, but seconds have never felt like years before—sometimes she stares at him and doesn’t know who the hell he is, but still innately knows that she can trust him.

He scratches a hand over his chin. He’s starting to grow a beard and he kinda likes it, only it probably doesn’t help her when she forgets who he is.

“You had a little relapse.” Pets a hand over her head, and she closes her eyes briefly at his touch.

“A relapse?” Her hands aren’t shaky anymore, and even though her skin is still pale and sweaty, she’s balancing more easily, slowly regaining her equilibrium, her movement, her personality.

“Yeah, umm—the drugs that—”

“I’m really hungry.”

He stops trying to explain to her how the people they trusted at the SGC have betrayed her again. How the words of one man can outweigh the lives of those he’s supposed to represent and protect. He’s seen injustices happen before, seen soldiers take advantage of their position when posted in other countries, seen superiors turn a blind eye to violence and illegal activities performed under them, seen them give praise to wild—almost feral—men, who then get promoted and continue the cycle.

It’s not everyone he’s worked with—not common enough to happen daily—but happens enough— he’s been around enough—to see the patterns.

Happens enough that he knows he can’t do very much to change it, because he’s only one guy, and it’s his word against a dozen others.

But he never thought the dishonesty would run this deep.

That suppressing people would happen for no reason other than because it can—to drill in the rules, what is acceptable and what is not, what rights humans have and how people who aren’t human are not privileged to the same rights.

How people who aren’t human—or fully human—are disposable.

They took his daughter.

His baby girl.

They murdered his daughter and every time he thinks of it, it makes his blood boil anew. But he knows he needs to temper his emotions for the sake of his wife.

She sits, her hands folded into her lap, complaining of being hungry. She hasn’t eaten in over a day because the meds and the withdrawal hurt her stomach, make her vomit.

Knows that she’s hungry, but she’s also putting on a show for him.

Knows because of the way that her lips twitch into the smallest grin, letting him know that if he can put away the emotions—the rage—that she’s willing to forget all that’s happened to her just to keep his good company for awhile.

He squeezes her thigh beneath the thin hospital blanket and leans forward to peck a kiss onto the scar on her hairline. “Let’s go get some food.”

She gestures through the privacy curtain to a currently empty medical area. Most of the lights are off, and there’s no nurse at the station. “No one’s released me yet.”

Tugs on her hand, getting her to sit while he drops down the railing on her bed. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title borrowed from Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece .

**Author's Note:**

> Story title borrowed from Shakespeare's Henry V  
> Chapter title borrowed from Shakespeare's Othello.


End file.
